How to: Make Your Community Feel Valued

The Power of Communities

This week the topic of discussion was based on community engagement. We had a guest speaker from a local council present to our class. She shared with us success stories of community engagement and why it is so important. There are many things that I deeply enjoyed about the presentation - to the extent where it sparked an interest in me as something I should consider trying my hand at, later in my own career. We were given handouts on "Increasing the level of public impact." The handout illustrated the IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum. There are 5 stages of public participation:

1. To Inform

2. Consult

3. Involve

4. Collaborative

5. Empower

Now I was learning all these things and starting to feel motivated about making changes in my own community, but then I heard this: "It's not about reaching a consensus." 

When I heard this, I just felt so insulted and irritated. Isn't the entire point of community engagement, to achieve an agreement of some sort? To negotiate, compromise and then reach a common understanding, which at least satisfies the needs of all parties? It's cruel and even offensive to inspire people to waste their breath for the sake of being heard, but not listened to. Hearing is superficial, but can be helpful. However if people have been invited to speak - then do more than hear them, actually listen, or the spectrum quickly turns into this:

1: Inform

2. Consult

3. Ignore   

4. Overrule

5. Demoralise

After the presentation, I read this week's reading by Hartz-Karp (2005), which shed some light on the situation and taught me that community engagement is essentially "deliberative democracy". The three key elements of deliberative democracy, which apply also to community engagement, are:

• Influence
• Inclusion
• Deliberation

Influence is the first fundamental step, because opinions must have the capacity to influence the process. Or why bother in the first place? Inhibiting an opinion from influencing discussion, essentially violates one of the primary purposes of community engagement.  Furthermore, the final step in deliberative democracy requires "movement toward [a] consensus" (Hartz-Karp 2005). Which means that the intention to justify non-consensus is based in error and self-interest. I say this because while I was reading Hartz-Karp (2005, 1), I stumbled upon this:

"We need to reinforce that we are a democracy, the problems confronting government are the problems of the community and we have to work together to solve them." 

I reflected on this statement and came to understand the problem with government and why consensus is not perceived as a necessity. 

The government is self-interested. If the Government's primary interest was honestly the community's primary interest, then the necessity of consensus would be undeniable. Instead, it seems like people are the tools that facilitate things for the government. It is the government who should facilitate things for the people. That quote should not say that "the problems facing the government are the problems of the community."

Since when does life revolve around the government? Life has always revolved around the community first, and the attitudes should be reversed. "We [the community] need to enforce that we are a democracy, the problems confronting [the] community are the problems of the government", it shouldn't be the other way around. We are more than just tools for the government to use when it suits them, and community engagement IS about consensus. If it is not - then you are doing it wrong.